Confessions of a shady underhand domain name dealer

By Stuart Corner
Monday, 22 September 2008 08:36

Opinion and Analysis

Domain name after market vendor NetFleet has been celebrating the recent opening of an aftermarket for .com.au domain names by revealing prices paid for some popular names, and branding all trades made prior to the new regime coming into force as having been through "shady underground negotiations."

And yes, I was one such. I owned a .com.au domain that I was not using. Not a particularly interesting one, just one that somebody wanted for his business. I cancelled it, he immediately applied for it and I pocketed a couple of hundred dollars. Shady and underhand? Hardly.

In June this year auDA, the regulatory body for Australian domain names, introduced a new policy   allowing open trading in .au domain names.

According to NetFleet CEO, David Nye, "Prior to the rule change, domain sales occurred through shady underground negotiations so it has been harder to confirm exact sales figures however it has been widely reported that jobs.com.au sold for over $200,000 late last year and tennis.com.au sold for approx $60,000.

Michael Park, a lawyer with Deacons, commenting on the upcoming policy change earlier this year was far from convinced that legitimising this supposed 'black market' would make much of an impact.

Writing in Deacons' newsletter, he said: "The current policy prohibits the transfer of .au domain names except in limited circumstances, which include transfer in the course of sale of business, transfer to related entities or transfer as part of settlement of a dispute...However, even under the current policy, it is still practically possible to sell a domain name by structuring the sale to fall within one of the limited circumstances under the policy.

"The relaxation of the current policy is therefore unlikely to have any significant impact other than to streamline the transfer process and enable domain name registrants and prospective registrants to make informed decisions in relation to the value of their domain names."

Well it has certainly done that. NetFleet reports that. PriceWaterhouseCoopers Australia, which has had to make do with www.pwc.com/au for years, has managed to get its hands on www.pwc.com.au by paying Personal Water Craft $10,450.

That's a very cheap price for such a large organisation if you ask me, and Nye's comments would support this view. "It always amazes me that companies will spend hundreds of thousands on TV advertising and then promote a website with a domain name so cumbersome that 50 percent of the viewers will not recall it". Quite right.

And he adds: "Online advertising in 2008 is expected to be nearly 25 percent higher than that of 2007. And that's in a poor economic climate. When nearly half a billion dollars are piled into this medium in Australia alone, it stands to reason that domain names, the essential infrastructure behind the web are going to be viewed increasingly as extremely valuable commodities."

NetFleet says that other public sales since the change include freestuff.com.au for $18,700 and reid.com.au for $14,300.

freestuff.com.au is the only .com.au name to make it thus far into DN Journal's Year-To-Date Top 100 Sales Chart.

And even that figure is peanuts compared to the price of $US118,000 paid earlier this month for Suchmaschinenoptimierung.de (it means search engine optimisation in German.